A year before I got to play Emily Dickinson in Austin Shakespeare’s Belle of Amherst, I spent a weird week shut up with her in Brooklyn. I lived in a sublet off of Prospect Park when the whole city got the heads up - Hurricane Sandy was on its way.

So, I filled up a ton of old wine bottles with water. Then I got some new wine bottles…the kind with wine in them. I bought a flashlight, a roasted chicken, some cookies from the bakery, a pile of fruit, bread, cheese, coffee, and I got books. Lots and lots of books.

I think I read every Sherlock Holmes that Conan Doyle wrote. I read a great book about Genghis Khan. But mostly, I read Emily Dickinson. I curled up on my mattress with her Complete Works. I opened to page 1 of her almost 1800 poems and just…read.

And so I isolated myself against the storm - drinking wine and imagining Amherst’s birds and bees flitting around Emily’s head - like she was a dignified Snow White. While my friends’ homes were flooding out in Red Hook, I was eating chicken in bed, reading poetry, and feeling alive.

I flashed back to this recently - for obvious reasons. I’m once again a shut-in. But instead of feeling buzzed by the crisis outside, I feel…dormant. Not once have I turned to Emily Dickinson during the pandemic. Her version of reverie just seemed un-doable. In fact, bit-by-bit fiction, creativity, and connection have left my sphere of habit. Life centers around scrambling now - scrambling for housing, income, safety…toilet paper.

Recently, I realized I’d turned old. Just like that. I felt hollow. Dusty. This was not the awe-soaked wonder of Dickinson’s isolation - or even the passionate sadness of it. This solitude drained me of blood. I was no longer human. I was now a tool - like factory equipment. In less than two years, I shifted from Dickinson’s motif of feathered hope to Chekhov’s “we will work” strategy.

Then in November, I went to see my first piece of theater - Austin Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. I filed in with all the other masked patrons. We sat in our seats. We faced one direction - like you do in church. The lights came down, actors came out, and something weird happened.

A few weeks later I went to the theater again. This time at Hyde Park. We all sat together and waited. Lights came down. Actors came out. And something weird happened…again.

It felt like one of those “near-death” stories. You know the ones? Where people talk about returning to their bodies from a long distance. I had that. In both cases. I had a sense of traveling back to myself…to my human-ness. As though I’d walked into the theater in black and white but everything went technicolor when the stage lights ignited.

What is that? Even now, in the aftermath of the experiences, I feel lighter - younger, prettier, stronger. Like I’ve fallen in love. What is that?

When we, the audience, sat down together we were open, anticipating something.
And then the actors walked out toward us. They were open. Anticipating.
A flash occurred. And everyone was changed.
I can only call that Real Life.

Look, soon… someday… we have to go back to the world. We’re going to have to sort of re-make it because so much is torn down. This is what I know. I don’t want to build a new world without color.

And I get color from the souls and dreams that collect in the chapel of theater.

Theater reminds us that we’re alive. Not just that we aren’t dead. But that we are ALIVE. It draws a circle around it and points it out, in case we forget. And we do forget.

When you keep the sabbath of theater, you can experience This Moment, and actually realize that you’re experiencing something. It can translate you from a thing - that drives to work and cleans dishes and frets over nothing - back to flesh and blood, back to breath, ideas, and feeling. And you get to experience your bigger, more substantial life.

For me, the chapel of theater closes the gap between the deep colors of eternity and the precious flicker of right now. So instead of getting to heaven at last…I’m going all along.

(I stole that last line from Emily.)

Conversations with Austin Shakespeare

Emily, Eternity, and the Chapel of Theatre (Helen Merino)